What does a 74-year-old man know about demanding professors, time-consuming homework and sleepless nights of studying for future-threatening finals? Better yet, what does a 74-year-old man know about dorm life, alcohol, frat parties and sex? What could any man at this age know about the plight of the modern college student? If that man is Tom Wolfe, he is just as wise to the ways of college life as any college student, male or female.
In his most recent novel, “I am Charlotte Simmons,” Tom Wolfe outlines the highs and lows of college life with surprising accuracy. This fictional novel is an intimate walk in the shoes of nerds, star athletes, malleable freshman girls, frat boys, indignant professors, clueless parents and nostalgic alumni. Wolfe’s journalistic ability to include various viewpoints and motives projects these elements in an unbiased glimpse of the college experience.
Despite its thickness, this 700-page book is a quick read. Although Wolfe outlines each scenario in great detail, he is never excessive or boring. The writing is easy to read, mostly colloquial and casual, though sometimes loud and frantic, as college tends to be.
The majority of the book is a first-hand observation of college life, as seen through the virginal eyes of Charlotte Simmons. Charlotte, the novel’s principal character, is a geeky academic prodigy from a small town in North Carolina. Before actually beginning her university education, she envisions college as an answer to her prayers, an intellectual foundation in which she will find students who share her hunger for knowledge. She imagines that high school trivialities like “cliques, hookups, drinking [and] resentments” will become merely a thing of the past as she finds her place at the fictional Dupont University.
Needless to say, Charlotte’s vision of college does not exactly come to life as she experiences her first taste of coed bathrooms, offensive rap lyrics and “sexile” — getting locked out of a dorm room while a roommate engages in random, casual sex. The unpleasant surprises of college life do not stop in the dormitory for Charlotte. She is appalled by the shameless activities that occur at fraternity parties. She is incensed over the attention and special treatment “dummy” athletes receive. She is surprised to find that it is more difficult to be accepted to college than it is to actually stay in college. And she is baffled by the fact that students who were smart enough to be accepted to such a prestigious university are capable of such poor behavior.
Charlotte begins to assimilate to college life when her natural beauty and innocence provoke a great deal of sexually tense situations. Despite Charlotte’s conservative values about the way young men and women should behave in a setting of hormone-crazed young adults and competitive girls, it is difficult for her to resist the temptation of male attention, alcohol and sex. When Charlotte finds that she does not always understand the intentions of college boys or even girls and that the choices she makes are not always the best, she begins to distrust everyone, including herself.
The principal conflict of the novel is Charlotte’s struggle to maintain her values and identity without isolating herself from everyone around her. She grapples with finding a middle ground between assimilation to college life and self-preservation. Ironically, Charlotte’s most valuable learning experiences happen outside the classroom.
Many critics of “I am Charlotte Simmons” consider the novel overly dramatic or exaggerated, but this reaction is to be expected. Most of these critics are middle-aged and several years out of college. To them, the events of the novel may seem a bit outrageous, but it is fair to say that the average adult would react in the same way to the real-life events of college. Important situations show up out of nowhere, often catching students off-guard and unprepared to respond calmly and carefully. The novel depicts the rash decisions students are forced to make both in their social and academic lives.
While Charlotte Simmons and Dupont University are fictional, the author’s experiences certainly are not. Through five years of research at prestigious universities, including consultations with linguists and sociologists, interviews with students and even visits to fraternity parties, Wolfe observed authentic college experiences and applied them to his novel. The fact that the book is based on true events makes it unpredictable; one does not expect characters in a book to behave as imperfectly as actual people. It is this imperfection that causes readers to identify with the characters and the story — and this is why the book deserves attention.
